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A Query About Guides

Hey gang. I made it back to town after a lovely stay in New England, and I’ve been ruminating on the blog a bit while I’ve been away. I’ve been thinking specifically about the dungeon guides that I love to do, and how I could make them publishable within a more relevant time frame. As many of you have noticed (and contacted me about!) I kind of lagged out mid T-12, and in an effort to improve that, I have some questions for you!

Currently, I try to cover information that is pertinent to the entire raid. I try to cover three main sections: fight overview, boss abilities, and tips for the raid broken into relevant role sections. I chose to go with this format because I honestly believe if the entire raid understands everyone’s role, it makes working out an independent strategy that will work for your team with all its resident quirks easier to manage.

That being said there’s two things I’d like to discuss.

Because Raiding Takes Preparation and Patience

Issue #1

The single biggest impedment to me getting guides out in a timely manner is Boss Abilities. I spend a lot of time with various tabs up trying to condense boss ability information into an easy to read and understand form, though I do provide links to WoWhead for all relevant abilities. This takes a ton of time. I initially chose to do this because it can be hard to understand the fight if you don’t understand the abilities, and hey, who wants 40 tabs open on raid night? However, if this isn’t really necessary I think dropping this particular function would save me a ton of time.

While I’d welcome lengthier responses in the comments section, I’ve chosen to embed a poll for quick responses:

Issue #2

There are two main restoration druid blogs I follow with a passion: Falling Leaves and Wings and Cannot Be Tamed. Both provide resto-perspective suggestions for healing encounters. However, they’re both in 25-man environments. For most things, this is fairly irrelevant since 1) No one has the same healing team so a general outline is pretty much all you need, and 2) There’s rarely a glaring difference between 10 and 25-man strategies that I’ve run across so far.

That being said, I don’t see a lot of 10-man resto “guides” out there for those of us in smaller teams. Many of the questions I receive specifically related to my guides are based on my perceptions of healing things up as a resto druid in 10’s since that’s what I do.

I’ve thought about several ways to tackle this, and before I give you another poll, I thought I’d briefly share my thoughts on the pros and cons of each. All of these would be intended to be used with my full-length overviews, because I really don’t want to repeat myself for things like “don’t stand in the bad during phase 2.”

1 guide per fight (team style): Many choices I make are based on my raid team. When you use major cool-downs and the like is going to be dependent on who you’re raiding with. My idea with this is to provide a pretty good overview on our team’s guidelines and strategies for encounters. These would likely be short and sweet “talkies” much like my 2-healing Ragnoras (except specifically geared towards the technical vs. musing side of things).

1 guide per fight (druid-centric style): This type of guide would completely ignore the team approach to healing, and just focus on a druid and possible roles they could fulfill during an encounter. I’m not really comfortable with this personally as the team component is very, very important as a healer.

1 guide per dungeon: A lot of class specific things are standard for boss fights such as LB’ing a tank and the like. My idea with this was to just provide a quick and dirty list of when you might deviate from the norm (LB a non-tank for instance) and things I’ve found helped me specifically (trinket here, c/d there). Since they’d be pretty darn short, I could just throw out an entire dungeon worth of bosses in one fell blow. For new content, it’d just be a page I updated as I finished new encounters. As above, this can be localized to team cool-down advice or restoration druid only tips.

So those are my current thoughts on Raiding Guides. I love doing them, I really like the feedback players have provided on differing strategies and approaches, and I will continue to write them up, for my own edification if nothing else. However, I’d also like to provide relevant information when it is relevant and can help those of you who actually follow this blog in the hopes that I’ll say something helpful about raiding stuff. To get the most bang out of my (limited time) buck, any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated!

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4 thoughts on “A Query About Guides”

Based on a lot of questions that I get (and don’t always have the answers for!) I think a lot of people would love a 10’s healing perspective for a lot of the encounters, especially any hard mode advice that you can offer. You could always do general healing with druid tips thrown in here and there where relevant, and I think they’d probably be very well received and quite wonderful 🙂 Just my 2 cents!

I am always looking for 10 man resto druid healing advice. I look at both Falling Leaves and Wings, and Cannot Be Tamed for advice since I can generally adapt it to what I need. But I’d love to see 10 man guides! Be it resto specific or team centric!

I voted for one team-centric guide per fight. As I play resto shaman I’m not directly interest by druid specific things, but I love reading tips for 10 man. A lot of what we can read out there is about 25 man. I’m specifically interested in healing team organisation, especially if on fight where we’d like to not use the standart strategy. Being a bit low on the dps side in our guild, I like reading insight about how to do fights with 2 healers or one tank instead.

Anyways, I prefer one guide per fight because it seems like it’s easier to get updates notices, but the length is not a big deal.

Concerning bosses abilities, it’s really helpful to either have a description of the abilities you’re mentionning, or a link to this decription. If Cannot Be Tamed and Falling Leaves and Wings (or any other blog you like) have these in their guides, it could be nice to link to their post directly. Less work for you, and I love reading many different perspectives when I’m looking for information about one specific fight.

I chose “Restoration Druid Full Dungeon Cheat Sheet” because I want to know what you, individually, personally, are doing. Of course not everyone wants that. The reason I want to know what you, individually, personally, are doing is that I’ve already got the big picture sorted (as a raid leader and try-to-do-strategy-person). I’m always looking for the way to pull out that last little bit of something from my Druid heals. Knowing what other Druids are specifically doing helps me learn what I can do to improve. That’s not to say I’ll do exactly what another person is doing. At an absolute minimum, it will give me some provoking thought, which is often of great benefit. And out of convenience, I may garner a new approach that is an easy change for me to make that makes a big difference–win!